I hope anyone reading this, or any of the other posts here, knows how dearly and sincerely I long for your approval as a reader; I want you to like my writing, and — just as importantly — I’ll never rarely ask for evidence of any of that. (I’ll just want you to keep coming back.)

That said, whoa, for a writer to get touched by a god, as it were — touched unbidden…

On this day in 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson penned a little note to Walt Whitman. Emerson had apparently just finished reading the first printing of Leaves of Grass; he was so overcome by the experience that he had to sit down and just lay it out there for the poet. Here’s the full text of the letter (RWE being notably more pithy than, say, the average blogger):

21 July Concord Masstts. 1855

Dear Sir,

I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment, which so delights us, & which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely of fortifying & encouraging.

I did not know until I, last night, saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, & have felt much like striking my tasks, & visiting New York to pay you my respects.

R. W. Emerson

Mr. Walter Whitman.

(Love that my benefactor, eh? Emerson saying he’s not Whitman’s benefactor, but vice-versa!)

Whitman — not really a fool, but maybe just a tad bit, um, well, brash — immediately put this private letter to good public use, even going so far as to quote from it on the spine of a later edition (without asking Emerson first). I can’t imagine, even remotely, having the temerity to do something like that. Even assuming I could sufficiently gather my wits anytime in the succeeding months to try, y’know? I’d just be so flattened, immobilized, by a letter at all like this.

Which made me wonder: what author living today would have this effect on me? What author looms so large either in my own head, or in the culture at large, that I’d just about fall over, stunned, if I got a letter like this from him or her?

I don’t know. Toni Morrison, maybe? Stephen King? John Irving? J.K. Rowling? Michael Chabon or Jeffrey Eugenides? Thomas Pynchon? Ghostly writing, in mid-air or on lavatory wall, signed by E.B. White, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut?

I’m not talking career here — not “Of whom could I make the best use?” but rather, “Whose unsolicited, whole-hearted and unambivalent approval would send me into swooning ecstasy?”

Who’d do it for you?